


A Hood, a Bow, and a Suit of Lincoln Green

by likethenight



Category: Robin Hood (2010), Robin Hood (Traditional)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Reality - Canon Divergence, Female Characters, Gen, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 15:03:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12796938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: This is the thing about legends: there is usually a grain of truth in there somewhere, a grain from which the story grows, and then, as a general rule, everything else that you think that you know about it is a lie.What if Robert of Locksley never came back from King Richard’s crusades and his wars in France? What if Robin Longstride never came back either? What if Marian took up her bow to defend her people instead?





	A Hood, a Bow, and a Suit of Lincoln Green

**Author's Note:**

> I finally got round to watching the 2010 Robin Hood movie the other day, and from the moment Cate Blanchett's Marian appeared on the screen with her bow, I knew that what I really wanted to see was a story in which it was Marian, not Robin, who became the famous outlaw. And then...well, then this happened. 
> 
> The story takes the 2010 film as its jumping-off point but I grew up reading various retellings of the legends and have used them as influence and inspiration as well, hence the second fandom tag. I have used the spellings of the characters' names I grew up with, purely out of personal preference: Marian rather than Marion, Locksley rather than Loxley. I've also dropped in the 'of' since Robert, as a nobleman of that time, would have been known as Robert *of* Locksley; surnames as we know them didn't come into use until hundreds of years later. I also couldn't resist including the Merry Men, although some of them are not quite as they appeared in the legends (or the film). It made sense, given the absence of all the men of fighting age, to make them women and children rather than exclude them.

This is the thing about legends: there is usually a grain of truth in there somewhere, a grain from which the story grows, and then, as a general rule, everything else that you think that you know about it is a lie.

Robert of Locksley never came back from King Richard’s crusades and his wars in France. He went off to join the King ten years earlier, leaving his bride of only a week to run his estates and look after his father, and though his wife looked for his horse on the road from the south, he never returned to her.

She stopped looking, as the years wore on. By the time Robert had been gone five summers, she had other things to worry about; bad harvest after bad harvest, endless taxes to pay for the King’s wars, the Church taking all of its tithes and leaving nothing left over for the people. Of course, if you tax a people to the very bone and leave nothing for them to eat or grow for next season, you will very soon find that there is nothing for you either, but Crown and Church do not tend to think in so pragmatic a way. 

The women of the land soon learned how to defend it, as well as farming it and raising their children, tending the sick and looking after their homes, all of those tasks they had already been doing since time immemorial. They learned to wield swords and bows, how to hunt in the forest and how to keep the wolf from the door - quite literally.

And the lady of the manor? Well. She learned, very quickly, how to defend her people.

*

I was almost an old maid when Robert and I were married. Aristocratic girls are betrothed in infancy, sent off to be raised by the family of their intended husband, and married once they are old enough to bear children. I was not an aristocratic girl, and Robert’s father was not all that high up in the social standing himself. I was almost twenty when we were betrothed, having spent my youth quite contentedly in helping my mother run the farm my father left us with when he got himself gored to death by a boar in the forest. Robert had shown no inclination to get himself a wife or any heirs, being too busy learning the craft of a soldier, and when the news spread across the land that King Richard was leading a great crusade to free the Holy Land from Saladin, Sir Walter decided he had to lay down the law. Robert was to be married off to the nearest suitable girl of child-bearing age, and father an heir before he ran away to war. My mother saw a way of securing the future of our farm and, reminding Sir Walter of the fact that my grandfather was the youngest son of a baron and I thus possessed a certain amount of noble blood, she brokered the marriage in less time than it takes for the sun to move from its zenith to halfway down the sky. Robert and I were married within the week, and within another week he was away to the war and I was left to settle into my new life as lady of the manor.

I bore Robert no child. Privately, this was a relief to me, although I knew Sir Walter was anxious to secure the succession of his estate. I had never felt any desire to marry or to have children, although I knew that would likely be my lot in life. All the love I had in me was for the land - my land - and the people who lived on it and helped me farm it. I had enjoyed freedom, more or less, before my marriage, and the thought of the loss of that freedom was bitter indeed. But my captivity, such as it was, lasted only a week, and once Robert had gone off to war, I found that I could again steer my life in the direction I wished. My mother had raised me to be strong and capable, and I took on the running of the estate as Sir Walter’s health began slowly to decline. I shifted the burden from his shoulders to my own, and cared for him as though he were my own father. In return he taught me, after much persuasion and, eventually, outright demands on my part, how to wield a sword and handle a bow. After all, his sight was failing and all the men had gone to fight the King’s wars. Who else was there to defend the estate from bandits and outlaws?

Sir Walter trained me, and I trained those of the women and children who wished to learn to help me defend our land. For the first three years or so, we did relatively well, good harvests keeping us in food. I dared to hope that when my husband should return, I would be able to show him an estate that was doing better by far than it had when he had been here. But it was not to be. Poor harvest followed upon poor harvest, and the taxes levied upon us only grew greater, while Father Tancred stored away the tithes we paid for his livelihood and did not see fit to share with his flock that tenth portion of everything we produced. The Sheriff came from Nottingham on a regular basis to harass us for the taxes we could not pay, and to make vile insinuations that I could pay off those taxes to him in person if I felt so inclined, which I most certainly did not. We had to sell the greater portion of our livestock, and the rest we had to eat. We had to send the children out into the greenwood to hunt; we dared not touch the King’s deer, but pheasants, boar and rabbits were fair game and the young ones quickly grew skilled at bringing them down. And we survived - just. 

They were grim times, bleak times - but we forged friendships stronger than iron, and we had times of laughter, too. Ellen a’Dale, the miller’s daughter, had a lute her father had won in a game of dice with a passing minstrel, years before, and with hardly any corn to mill, she had plenty of time to become an accomplished player, using her strong, clear voice to sing the songs that had been handed down through all our families. All the villagers would crowd into Sir Walter’s great hall to hear her play, to sing with her and to dance, and though he grumbled about the noise he could usually be found sitting in his chair, thumping his stick on the floor in time with the music and calling for more wine. 

As the seventh year of famine drew in, though, those happy times grew fewer and further between. We were hard put to it to see off the raiders and outlaws, driven by desperation and hunger themselves to take what little we had left. The children were growing up and needing more food, and we had less and less to give them. Little John, son of John the brewer, had long overtaken his father in size and constantly complained of his aching belly, and the others were not far behind. When Father Tancred returned to York, taking with him tales of the groaning tithe barn in our little village, I knew we had only a few weeks at most before the dignitaries of the Church took all that we had left to fill their own bellies, unused as they were to going without food.

I found an unlikely ally in Father Tancred’s replacement, Friar Tuck, a large and good-humoured man who brought with him a cart filled with beehives. Here was a man of the cloth who knew how to provide for himself, rather than taking all his parishioners had to give and giving nothing but spiritual sustenance in return. One cannot live on the word of God, and his supposed love for his children does not put food in our bellies. Tuck was more generous with his produce, sharing with the villagers the honey and the mead produced by his beloved bees, and between us we began to think of some way we might prevent the contents of the tithe barn reaching York. The seed corn was my most pressing worry, for without that we could not grow more, and next year’s harvest would not be poor, it would be non-existent. 

“They’ll come for it, my lady, make no mistake,” said Tuck, sitting on one of the rough-hewn wooden benches inside our little church. I did not visit the church often, at least not for services; to tell the truth, Father Tancred’s sanctimoniousness had always made my skin crawl, and he was not the conduit I wanted for my communication with God. I preferred to slip through the door alone, unannounced, and sit quietly in the dim light that struggled through the window-slits, watching the motes of dust dance in the air and contemplating the nature of things.

“I know,” I replied, keeping my voice low; for all that I trusted my people, I knew that what we were discussing was uncomfortably close to heresy, the idea that the Church might possibly be wrong. “What can we do? We can’t hide it and claim we have nothing, for they already know it’s here.”

Tuck rocked backwards on his bench, till I feared it might break and spill him onto the floor, but it held, and after a moment or two’s thought he rocked forwards again, leaning a little towards me with the spark of an idea burning in his eyes. “What if we let them take it - and then take it back?” he whispered urgently, and after a moment’s confusion I saw what he was trying to say.

“An ambush in the forest,” I breathed. “Little John and his fellows would surely be able to carry out such an attack.” I paused, thinking it over; already I realised the flaw in the plan. “But they would need a leader. They are all little more than wild boys who can hunt game in the forest; but pheasants and boars are one thing, and the Church’s men-at-arms are quite another. John and the boys would need someone who could keep them in line, make them stick to the plan. Someone who could come up with a plan in the first place.” I sat back on my bench, disappointed. We had no soldiers, for they were all away at war. We had no great strategic thinkers, only half-wild hunters and women who had learned to fight only because they had to.

Tuck gave me a long, hard stare. “I think they already have one, my lady.”

I frowned, then blinked in confusion as I realised what he meant. “Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I am no soldier.”

“But you’ve kept all these people alive for all this time. Seven bad harvests have finished off bigger villages than this one. The King’s tax collectors, bandits, or that wretched Sheriff have seen off others. But here you are, still strong though you’re hungry, with your band of women and children keeping the raiders at bay. Don’t underestimate yourself, my lady. You may not be a soldier, but you’re a damned good leader.”

I mulled over his words during the day or two that followed our conversation. Perhaps he was right. At the very least, it was my duty to try to provide for my people, through thick and thin, and these days were thin indeed. It had to be worth trying.

I called together a group of the best hunters and fighters in the village, those who I knew could be trusted to keep a secret, and met them in a clearing in the greenwood, far away from prying eyes and ears. Without telling them exactly why I was asking them, I gathered their opinions on the best place upon the road to take a cart which might be travelling through, one which might be accompanied by armed guards on horseback. I asked them how they might undertake this hypothetical task, how they would disable the guards and seize the cart with as little danger to themselves as possible. 

They clamoured to answer me, their words tumbling over each other until I had to hush them and tell them to speak one at a time, and slowly. I was surprised by their ingenuity and the wealth of ideas they had to offer; I had known that they knew the woods better than anyone, but had not thought to consider what that knowledge might have grown into. 

“A rope across the track, my lady,” suggested Little John, “a thin one, so they don’t see it. It’s dark enough under the trees, you’ve got to have good eyes to catch something like that. Sling it across at a bit above the height of a horse’s head, you’ll swipe all the guards off in one, and maybe the fellow driving the cart as well.”

“Shoot it across, with an arrow,” burst out Guillemette, a skinny girl with a bush of red hair and quick, clever hands; her father had been a guard at Nottingham castle, hence her Norman name, but everyone called her Will. “Then they won’t have the chance to see it until it’s too late and they’re riding into it. If the cart is full of anything of value they’ll be going as fast as they can, they’ll be keen to get out of the forest without anything happening to them. Shoot the rope across just in front of them, they ride into it, whoosh, they’re all on the ground.” She mimed something being caught up into the air and then falling to the earth with a smack of her two hands together. 

“And if the rope does not catch them?” I asked, thinking that it sounded like a good plan, but that we must sound out all the potential flaws, all of the ways in which it could go wrong.

“Then we put arrows in every last one of them,” said Will with some relish. “Take their horses, take their cart, and hope that whatever’s inside it will feed us through the winter.”

I nodded; that seemed fair payment enough for taking back what had always been ours to begin with. We continued to bat our plan back and forth around the group, until I felt we had covered everything that could possibly go wrong with it. Now it was time for me to choose who would take part and which role each person would play. 

“Now, before we go any further I must ask you all to swear that you will speak of this to no one,” I said. “You might have gathered that I am not speaking in jest. This ambush of which I speak is not just some game to test how well you can think through how you would handle a situation like this.” We had used this trick many times in the past, encouraged by Sir Walter, to practise how we would see off any raiders coming to the estate in hopes of taking our produce, and although the raids had never turned out anywhere close to how we had imagined them, the act of talking them over had helped us to work more closely together when the bandits did arrive. 

Everyone swore solemnly that they would never tell, and then I set out to explain the idea that Friar Tuck had put into my head. 

“The Church is sure to send men from York soon to take away all the tithes we paid to Father Tancred, which he stored in the tithe barn and would never share with us although he had far more than he would ever need. We cannot stop them taking it, for we would never win a pitched battle with men-at-arms, but we can go after them as they travel through the greenwood and take it back by force. I propose that we let them get a decent way from the village, and then ambush them and reclaim what is rightfully ours.”

I looked around the circle of faces gathered close around me, feeling a sudden swell of pride that I had been able to bring all these people together, to help keep them alive, as Friar Tuck had pointed out, and to give them the skills they needed to protect our land. Some, like Will, were still children, others like Little John were fast growing into adulthood - and then there were women like myself and like Ellen, doing what they had to do. I thought for a moment, and then began to set out the plan as it had taken shape in my mind.

“Will, you shall shoot the rope across the road upon my signal. We must make sure you time it exactly right. Too early and they will see it, too late and they will be past us. Geoffrey, Ankarette, Thomas, Adela, you will be ready to use your arrows to wound any guards who look like they will need further encouragement to give up their cargo. John and Rohese, be ready to leap in with your quarterstaffs, and if they are not needed, to calm the horses and take possession of the cart. Emma, Aenor and Roger, you will catch the soldiers’ horses and calm them, ready to lead them back to the village. Ellen, you and I will wait in the trees and watch for the cart as it approaches. You will be further up the road, so you can signal to me when you see the cart, and I will give the signal for the ambush to begin when it approaches the place where we are hiding.”

“How shall I signal to you?” Ellen wanted to know, and that gave me pause. I probably would not be able to see her in the gloom of the forest, and we did not wish to give our targets advance warning of our presence by sending out an obvious signal.

“You can sing, right?” said Rohese, a stocky young woman who had become a mother of seven before her twentieth birthday, and who was possessed of the strength of an ox; she was positively dangerous with her quarterstaff and had brained more than one would-be raider of our precious livestock. “Make a bird noise. Owls are easy to do, aren’t they?”

Ellen frowned, but young Thomas piped up, “I can teach you how to do it, Mistress Ellen. I can make an owl noise that other owls hoot back to, because they think I’m one of them.”

“And owls sometimes hunt in the daytime,” put in Adela, a small, slight girl who could put an arrow through the eye of a fleeing rabbit at a hundred paces. “So it won’t matter if the cart is coming through by day or by night, they oughtn’t to think it’s strange to hear an owl.”

More discussion of the plan followed, and by the time the sky was red with the coming sunset, I was confident that we all knew exactly what we had to do.

The Church’s men arrived a week later, marching into the village without so much as a by-your-leave and pressing Friar Tuck into service to help them empty the tithe barn of all but the meagrest supplies to see him through the winter, the bishop and his household being far more important, far more worthy of all this food than a humble, lowly friar. I played my part, striding up to them and demanding to know what they thought they were doing, pretending to be cowed by their authority, and leaving them to it with a downtrodden expression on my face, although as I turned to go I caught Tuck’s eye and nodded almost imperceptibly. He would be ready to receive us when we brought the cart back to the village under cover of darkness.

As dusk fell, I dressed myself in some of Robert’s old clothes, breeches and tunic of Lincoln green to blend in with the trees, and a hood to hide my face. I bound my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck, pulled the hood up over my head and stole out of the house as quietly as I could; I did not want to bring Sir Walter into this, and although his sight was completely gone now, his hearing seemed to have become more acute.

I met my merry band of ambushers under the great oak in the greenwood, and we quietly went over the plan one more time. Ankarette had seen the men-at-arms tying a great cloth over the top of the cart to cover its contents as she had slipped out of her mother’s cottage, and Will said that she had looked back from the edge of the forest to see them pulling the cart away from the tithe barn, so we knew that our target was on its way. We moved through the forest to the point the children had chosen for our ambush so softly that only someone who knew we were there would have noticed our passing, and not for the first time I marvelled at the skills our little hunters had acquired over these seven lean years. Each one of us took his or her place among the trees, and we waited for the cart to come lumbering along the road. I glanced around me, from my vantage point on a low branch, and smiled to myself; it was hard to pick out any of my little band, although I knew exactly where they all were. Will, like myself, had hidden her hair with a hood, and if I looked hard enough I could make her out, perched in another tree across the road. John and Rohese were crouched at the top of the banks alongside the road, one on either side, and my archers were ranged in the trees, two on each side of the road, carefully positioned around the place where we hoped to stop the cart and its escort. 

I willed myself to be as still as I could, concentrating on the sound of my own breathing and listening hard for the thud of hoofbeats, the creak of leather harnesses and the call of an owl. Once I started, hearing a hoot that was unlike that which Ellen and I had practised, under Thomas’ expert tuition, but then I realised that it must be a real owl out hunting, and not the signal I was waiting for. I breathed deeply, willing my fast-beating heart to calm, and then came the sound I was expecting, Ellen’s low hoot carrying to me on the breeze, and I turned my attention to the road. I could hear the cart approaching now, the men-at-arms talking in low voices, and as it drew into view I saw that it was travelling about as fast as it could go; the soldiers didn’t like having to pass through the greenwood and wished to get through as quickly as possible. Unlucky for them that this was the only road to York from our village, or at least the only one that wouldn’t take them on a detour of at least a day’s ride. 

I held my breath as they approached, gauging their distance as we had talked about, and when I saw that they were about to cross the imaginary line Will and I had agreed upon, I caught her eye, raised my hand and then dropped it like an axe falling upon a bough, making a noise like the bark of a fox as I did so, in order that she would get the message even if she couldn’t see the movement of my hand. 

Instantly the forest sprang to life around me. Will shot her line across the road, and it did its job as perfectly as we had imagined. The men-at-arms slammed into it, one by one, and each one was carried backwards off his horse. Emma, Aenor and Roger, all of them with a particular affinity for the animals, ran after the panicked horses to catch them and calm them down, and Ankarette, Geoffrey, Adela and Thomas set to incapacitating the men-at-arms with their arrows as the men scrambled to their feet and made to draw their swords. I had forbidden any killing, unless it was completely unavoidable; I did not want to put murder on anyone’s conscience, nor did I wish to jeopardise any of my people, for the death of a man-at-arms in the Church’s pay would surely bring the forces of the law down upon our village. Little John and Rohese leapt down from their places upon the banks and pulled the cart’s driver bodily from his seat, and Rohese took up the reins and swiftly turned the cart around in a wide place a little further up the road, ducking nimbly under Will’s rope. I jumped down from my branch and met Ellen running up the road, and between us we roped together the men-at-arms and the driver, tying the rope securely so that none of them could move unless all the others moved too. 

We returned to the village full of jubilation, although I made everyone stay as quiet as they could manage; we did not wish to draw any attention to ourselves or to what we had done. Friar Tuck met us at the tithe barn and we hastily unloaded the cart and began to carry everything to hiding places all over the village; cottages and cow-stalls, now unused since all the cows were sold or eaten, cellars and stables. We tethered the horses in the stable-yard at Sir Walter’s house, and put the cart in one of the fields; anyone who came upon it would think it belonged to the villagers.

“Well done, my lady,” said Friar Tuck under his breath as I handed him a barrel of seed-corn. “But I think we have one more job left to do. You know, the best way to hide this will be to plant it, now. That way, when it sprouts I can claim it as a miracle from God, and even the bishop can’t argue with that.”

And so we set to, out in the fields by the light of the moon, each of us with a cloth filled with seed-corn slung over our shoulders, sowing every last grain of it and praying that this time the harvest would be good. 

Slipping as quietly as I could back into the house, I made my way up to my chamber, and took off the clothes I had borrowed from my absent husband. It had felt good to wear them, I could move much more easily in them than in my usual dresses, and for the first time I caught myself wondering whether I might have cause to wear them again, sooner rather than later. I had thoroughly enjoyed myself on our night-time adventure, and I found that already I was longing for more.

Before too long, news of the ambush spread, and I was most amused to hear that it had apparently been led by a hooded man in Lincoln green who had spoken not a word, but whose men had obeyed him without question. Rumour had it that my husband had returned and taken up the cause of his villagers, or that Robert was dead but that another man had come back from the wars in his place; nobody, it seemed, thought for one moment that perhaps the ringleader might have been me. I was pleased by this, for it meant that I could continue about my business without fear of reprisal against myself. All I needed to do was deny all knowledge of the ambush if questioned, and nobody would ever think to suspect me or my people.

We held no feast to celebrate our success, for I did not wish to alert anyone who might be watching to the unexpected return of our tithes, and we would need every last morsel of food to see the village through the winter. Instead we carefully rationed out all that we had regained, and along with Tuck’s honey and mead, I thought that we might have a chance of surviving, especially if our luck turned and the harvest this year was a better one. 

Having solved my own village’s problems, for now at least, I found myself wondering about the others. We were surely not the only ones who had had to endure an unwelcome visit from the bishop’s men, and I sent out some of the children to see what they could find out. Soon enough they came back to me with tales of other villages laid as low as we had been, and I began to formulate a plan. I would lead my band into the forest, and we would intercept as many of these consignments of stolen goods as we could. We would then return the produce to its rightful owners, and thus secure their livelihoods for at least one more winter. 

It worked better than even I could have imagined. I set my little hunters up in camps in the greenwood, and sent my little spies out to find which village was being raided next. Then we ambushed the carts, tied the men-at-arms into bundles in the middle of the road, and took the food back to where it was most needed. 

But I came to realise that even this was not enough. The King’s tax collectors came ever more frequently with ever higher demands, demands that no village could afford to pay, and so they took what they could instead, leaving the people almost destitute. I realised that it was time for us to raise our sights a little higher and begin to waylay the tax collectors as well. I recruited more hunters and spies to my band, encouraging them to prove their worth and then setting them to ambush alongside the more seasoned hunters who had been with me from the beginning. We gave the tax collectors the same treatment as the Church’s men, taking their carts full of gold and silver coins and leaving them tied up in the middle of the road to make their own way back home. 

The Church’s tithes were one thing, but the King’s taxes were quite another. By this time King Richard had died in France and his younger brother John had taken the throne, and though he had no wars to pay for, John seemed more determined even than his brother to tax his people into the very ground. And when reports reached court of tax collectors being ambushed and robbed in the greenwood of Sherwood Forest, I am sure his fury was a sight to behold. Soon enough notices began appearing in towns across Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, calling for any information leading to the arrest of the man in Lincoln green known as “The Hood” or “Robert the Hood”, or “Robin Hood”, and placing a high price upon that man’s head. Robin Hood was declared an outlaw, and it was decreed that he should be arrested on sight. I took care to hide my suit of Lincoln green very well in my chamber, but I was confident that I was safe. I was not Robin Hood, after all; I was not a man, and surely only a man could be carrying out these ambushes and raids. If my house were to be searched, and the clothing found, I would tell the truth: it had belonged to my husband, who had left for the Crusades ten years ago and never returned. Lincoln green cloth was a common enough sight in these parts, for it was hardwearing and lasted well, and the green enabled one to blend into the foliage in the forest, when hunting rabbits or boar. There must be hundreds of suits of Lincoln green across Nottinghamshire. Why should this be the one they were looking for?

I held my head high and went about my daily business. I ran the estate, I looked after my father-in-law, I cared for my people. I made sure that I was seen in the village every single day, and that any absences were well-accounted for. Even if it were the least likely thing in the world for me to be suspected, I knew I must always have my story right, just in case. But at dusk and by night, and whenever there was a cart-load full of stolen property making its way through the forest just asking to be taken, I led my band of merry hunters into battle, stealing from the rich to give back to the poor. And truly I hoped that my husband would never return, for this lifetime of freedom to do as I pleased was not something I would ever again give up without a fight. No man had earned the right to tell me what to do, not even Sir Walter, and least of all Robert of Locksley who had married me, bedded me and left me all in the space of a single week. One week of that captivity was more than enough to last me for the rest of my life. Instead, I would let his name protect me just as I protected my people. In his absence he was a better shield than he would ever have been had he been here. Let people believe in the famous outlaw named Robin Hood. Those who really mattered knew the truth.


End file.
